You would have been blindsided by the success of the iPhone if you had been around before then.
It’s IMPOSSIBLE to explain it to you because, in your mind, the money is everything. Every company must start with billions/trillions of dollars or they won’t be successful. In 1977, when Apple was founded, they MUST have had hundreds of millions of dollars because there’s no way a company without massive amounts of money could have made a computer that eventually becomes the best selling PC in the world.
Finding a market niche and selling that makes those folks delighted to buy? Hmm, that sentence does not contain money OR developers, so can’t be it. Oh, and, since they were eventually successful, we NOW no that no one becomes successful by playing fair, so, no, it 100% can’t be that they know how to produce devices and services that people value and want to spend money on!